Yeah, I watched few panels and followed discussion on Sabine's blog, where physicists debated each other's theories and they quarrel as much as we do in this forum, only on the higher level. Physicists rarely read papers they criticise and in long winded way critique reflects their own theories they are secretly promoting.
Only the worst physicists criticize papers they haven't read. Sadly, those are usually the ones that appears in the media. The physicists I know always read a paper with great care before commenting about it.
At least currently, supporting a new gravity theory is more or less emotionally based, same as supporting a football club.
Dr. Farnes didn't present a new theory of gravity. He simply took the findings from the existing theory, GR, and postulated the existence of negative mass particles.
But he also had to postulate that they're being produced spontaneously throughout the universe, to make this model fit the observations - this is the key problem with his idea, for a variety of reasons. Such as: what's the mechanism for this negative mass particle production? He doesn't say, he just postulates that it's happening - but if true, this would violate the conservation of mass-energy. He also doesn't explain why this process doesn't run away and quickly destabilize the universe. These kinds of concerns are very serious, theoretically, and until he can answer these questions, his idea seems very fanciful and closer to wishful thinking than reality.
The main thing is that everybody is proactively hiding known discrepancies within own theory. Sabine did a nice job of busting dark matter theories by exposing rarely mentioned contradictions:
Of course that is because she has her own theory without dark matter.
Sure but her idea doesn't include basic theoretical violations like contradicting the conservation of mass-energy, so naturally she would favor her idea over his.
Question,
Within the reality of physics would it be possible to turn an object into energy and propel that energy at the speed of light?
What if the Higgs boson is the key to light speed or limitless speed? Everything is energy anyway, Even physical matter right? So it makes sense to me that some kind of technological process could convert matter to energy and back again, I mean, Why not a living object? Would it be so impossible?
I believe the key to light speed travel is as simple as converting our mass to energy in such a way that when we convert back to our original form. This process may sound sci-fi , Or even exactly like teleportation, The thing is, Even at light speed, We have light years. So even as energy, it would take us 13 billion lightyears to reach the other side of the cosmos and by the time we got there, it would be vaster still.
Space is really Big and expanding.
The speed of light is actually very slow on cosmological or even interstellar scales. Gravitational field propulsion offers a method for superluminal spaceflight (no upper limit on transit speeds) with no time dilation. Alcubierre worked out the basic concept within the framework of GR 25 years ago.
So rather than trying to convert matter into energy and back again to achieve the modest velocity of c, the best method of interstellar transit is by distorting the spacetime geometry around the device so you can travel at thousands or billions+ of times faster than light.